Python Programming Tutorials

Amazon's Simple Queue Service is a highly scalable service to help cloud-based applications use a queuing system which is reliable & scalable. Amazon's queue has it's pros & cons, like the messages may not be received in the order they were queued, and you may receive duplicates, I had written an...

HMAC stands for Hash-base Message Authentication Code, it is key based message digest algorithm which can be used for verifying the integrity of the message (i.e. the original message from which the hash is generated) or to verify the authenticity of the sender of the message or both. Nowadays,...

Command line arguments are quite old, in the days of DOS they were generally just options enabling/disabling mechanism and were known as switches. But, after the growth of *nix systems command line arguments have been developed and have provided a lot of features to power users.
Here's an...

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a low-cost & high-availability storage service provided by Amazon Web Services. It's really popular, more so due to the recent switching of IT infrastructures to cloud-based solutions. You can know more about Amazon S3, it's pricing structure etc. at...

Secure hashes, message digests, or simply digest as they are popularly known are specific algorithms which take data of any type and any size and return a fixed bit length data that'll always be the same for the arbitrary data provided, in case the data is modified the hash will change vastly.
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JSON has now become a extensively used data format, primarily used to exchange data between different systems, you may say that it is a successor of the XML format in this regard. From small to very large web applications use JSON, some still provide XML format as an option while others don't, a...

Internet Message Access Protocol better known as IMAP is one of the most popular & widely used protocols for accessing emails from remote servers, the other one being POP (Post Office Protocol), and almost all modern email clients support both these protocols.
IMAP works on TCP/IP stack, and...

Post Office Protocal version 3 (POP3) is protocol of the TCP/IP stack's application layer, used to fetch email from remote mail servers. POP is one of the most used protocols for email retrieval, other one being IMAP. Virtually every email application, be it in the desktop or mobile supports the...

CGI or Common Gateway Interface allow servers, primarily HTTP servers, to interface with external programs like Python, Perl, Ruby scripts or even binary programs written in C/C++. The most popular & most used web server - Apache - can easily be configured for CGI scripts. Let's look at...

SQLite is a very small RDBMS, unlike other popular RDBMS it does not have a client/server model, data is stored in a file. SQLite is very portable, and very popular for creating prototype systems before actual work is started. Here, we'll see how to access & modify SQLite database in Python. Python...

In a previous article Access MySQL Databases in Python few months back, in that I had discussed using MySQLdb python module to access MySQL in Python scripts, though that being easy & good lacked many important features like placeholders/parameterization, lazy execute & fetch, buffering of large...

Image manipulation is an interesting subject, as well almost inevitable in today's websites, you can use it to render CAPTCHA, crop & resize images, convert between image formats and many more advanced functions. Python with it's growing popularity has encouraged the community & enterprises to...

CSV files are quite common these days owing to the fact that CSV files are simple text and make data transfer between different systems very easy. CSV stands for Comma Separated Values, i.e. the fields are separated by comma, so there exists similar formats where the separator is a different...

Geolocation software/services are used to find the actual geographic location of an IP address, the geographic information may be accurate till city/ZIP code level. Maxmind's GeoIP is one such provider of IP address geographic information, they have both free and paid data subscriptions which...

Being in the era of instant updates & notifications one would at some point or the other would need to parse/format date & time, be it any language. Here, we'll see how we can parse & format date/time with Python.
Python is natively equipped with the functions to make our job easier, the...

Python being one of the most popular languages, it's being used increasingly used for creating dynamic websites or for specific parts of websites, like Google's support fully runs on Python scripts. But, for this type of usage the ability to access RDBMS is indispensable, although unlike PHP,...

Signals are a limited form of inter-process communication, it analogous to hardware interrupts. It is generally used by the operating system to notify processes about certain issues/states/errors, like division by zero, etc. In case, you want to know read more about signals read Signal and...

At times it's possible to complete a batch job using parallel processing using fork instead of threads which needs much more careful planning. On the other hand fork is easy to implement, although it might not be as efficient and flexible as threads.
Forking is an important part of *nix design,...

Strings and Lists are 2 important data types in the suite of structured data types in python. Strings and lists are similar, but they are not same and many people donít know the main difference between a string and a list in python. One simple difference between strings and lists is that lists can...